In his homily, Fr Jimmy McPartland said: “His death is like a great disaster. His death on Holy Thursday has stunned the community. It is untimely and unjust.”

“There is nothing anyone can say or do today that makes sense of Stephen’s death. One of the biggest difficulties we have now is that we feel sort of powerless, events have moved in a swift and unforeseen way, beyond our control.”

Mr Lynch’s mother said the day he died was the worst of her life. “Stephen has his own personal problems, and I knew he was never going to get old but I just didn’t expect it to be like this,” she said.

Local community

Bishop Eamonn Walsh concluded the ceremony, praising the local community that has also had to deal with the death of Reece Cullen (16) in a stabbing last January.

“Every time I come to a funeral here I get so inspired, the heart of Tallaght is something so generous and so deep. You know and I know that we’re not going down the road of tit-for-tat and an eye for an eye, that’s only a spiral of the violence that only ends in self-destruct.”

Bishop Walsh appealed to the young people of the community, saying “there has to be a better way”.

“We’ve been here too often in the past and we don’t want to see this again.

“We pray that our justice system will be such that it won’t just focus on the length of the sentence but that it will focus on repairing the damage done, that it will put a lien on people’s property and we make them work to repair the damage.”